[pd-discuss] Contact between Wikimedia Foundation and Wellcome Trust regarding image collections?

Wed Jan 12 23:11:17 UTC 2011

Thanks for your email, Michael!

While the Open Knowledge Foundation is, as you correctly point out, a
not-for-profit organisation rather than a for-profit entity (and there
is no other 'non-open' commercial agenda), nevertheless as an
organisation it is committed to promoting open knowledge as defined in
the Open Knowledge Definition (opendefinition.org) - i.e. material
which others are free to reuse and distribute for any purpose, not
just material which we ourselves can display as part of our various
projects.

As part of our mission, we are interested in encouraging institutions
and organisations which publish digital copies of works which are in
the public domain not to restrict what people can do with these copies
(e.g. restrictions on redistributing these works, restrictions on
commercial reuse, restrictions on derivative works, etc). Luckily we
are not alone in this endeavour. For example we put a point on this in
the recent Public Domain Manifesto [1] which was signed by numerous
organisations and individuals [2]:

"What is in the Public Domain must remain in the Public Domain.
Exclusive control over Public Domain works must not be reestablished
by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works,
or using technical protection measures to limit access to technical
reproductions of such works."

There was also a point on this in the closely related Public Domain
Charter [3], which was drafted by the folks at Europeana, the European
Digital Library, which over 1500 cultural heritage organisations
contribute to:

"What is in the Public Domain needs to remain in the Public Domain.
Exclusive control over Public Domain works cannot be re-established by
claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or
by using technical and or contractual measures to limit access to
technical reproductions of such works. Works that are in the Public
Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they
have been digitised."

Non-commerical restrictions also mean that the images can't be used in
projects such as Wikipedia, which is why I was emailing Mathias to see
if anyone at the Wikimedia Foundation has been in touch with the
Wellcome about this, who are otherwise very supportive of open access
and open data.

Hope this helps!

Jonathan

[1] http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org/
[2] http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org/node/8/signatures
[3] http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/public-domain-charter-en

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Michael S. Hart <hart at pglaf.org> wrote:
>
> No need to look for such "genuinely open" material is this cause,
> as I see it, unless one has some other agendas not genuinely open.
>
> Let's wait for the real answer, rather than just sumise here. . . .
>
>
> Michael
>
>
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>
>> On 12 January 2011 19:35, Michael S. Hart <hart at pglaf.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Unless your effort is patently "commercial," in opposition to the
>> > words you use to describe it, what's the problem?
>>
>> Because, I would imagine, Jonathan is looking for material that is
>> genuinely open as in http://opendefinition.org/ :)
>>
>> Rufus
>>
>> > Michael S. Hart
>> > Founder
>> > Project Gutenberg,
>> > Inventor of eBooks
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>> >
>> >> Hi Mathias,
>> >>
>> >> We were interested in featuring several images of public domain works
>> >> from the Wellcome Trust Image Collection [1] on the Public Domain
>> >> Review [2], but we notice that their terms of use for the images in
>> >> the collection is quite restrictive (personal, non-commercial use
>> >> only) [3].
>> >>
>> >> I wonder whether anyone from Wikimedia has been in touch with them
>> >> about licensing any of the images under CC-BY-SA or similar for use on
>> >> Wikipedia and elsewhere? It seems that they have some unique images
>> >> that could be valuable to illustrating Wikipedia articles.
>> >>
>> >> Do you know anyone from the UK who might have been in touch with them?
>> >>
>> >> All the best,
>> >>
>> >> Jonathan
>> >>
>> >> [1] http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/
>> >> [2] http://publicdomainreview.okfn.org/
>> >> [3] http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Terms+of+Use.html?
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > pd-discuss mailing list
>> > pd-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/pd-discuss
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg